“May I conduct a small search now?”
“Oh, my, I must be quite a disappointment for you today. The Library is closing for a small while. We are catching up on inventory of our holdings. Many books have transferred in and out of the Library this past while, and we have a great deal of work to do. So, no, I'm afraid we are closing fairly soon.”
“When will you be open again?”
“That I cannot say for certain. This work will take some time, but do check back with us at your leisure.”
“When is this book due back?” I asked, indicating the Ars.
“Given your patronage, you are free to keep it for as long as you like on what we call a perpetual renewal basis. The Library has given me the instructions to allow you to take your time with it. Do keep it safe.”
“So, I can keep this book forever?”
“No, that is impossible. We only rent and borrow our books. We never own them. The Library owns them all. But we, we die, and the books change hands, and when there are no more hands, they return here. But I must regretfully ask you to leave as we are now officially closed.”
And so out I went, back through the tunnel and mysteriously re-emerging in my apartment, Ars in hand. There was a handwritten note placed conspicuously on my bathroom mirror:
Betrayed twice by the same coin. May you suffer my eternal returns.
I reasoned that the author of the note was none other than Castellemare. I also came to the conclusion – albeit without solid evidence – that if all events were predetermined, that there were two scripts. The script Castellemare had me follow, and a higher one that he did not have access to: the meta-script of the Library. My obtaining of the Ars may have not been in Castellemare's script. The cryptic threat at the end of the note gave me worrisome pause. Did Castellemare mean to do me harm, or was this merely a petulant swipe, an empty threat designed to induce anxiety? Or, was this just another twist in the plot and him playing a role that would lead me where the narrative was to lead me? Given that Castellemare was out of my communicative reach, there was no hope of me rubbing it in to satisfy my need for revenge in having been strung along. I could take some solace in the fact that my goings-on were somehow communicated to him. However, the need to get some measure of revenge was still burning within me. There was no need to involve any of these enigmatic persons any further, for it would serve no real purpose. In fact, I would have most likely given them the reason and means to sabotage me.
There would probably be no real harm in me possessing the Ars atrocitatis given that the events written therein were a foregone conclusion. As the Library has shown me, there is really no such thing as plagiarism, for every work written has been written by every possible hand. In the last two years, I have witnessed – or at least read, amounting to very much the same in the Library's view – books changing authors, so that something like the Red Lion had a roving authorship. What harm in me making claim that this book was mine, that I authored it? That I was the author of this book was an odd touch, perhaps suggesting that the Library had an ironic sense of humour. But, in the end, and given my involvement, I felt entitled to being the author, for had I not authored these events in my own way, bringing about the synthesis? I could have spent the last two years living or writing this mystery, and I found that there really was no difference. How very much the recycling of modernist aesthetics. I end with one more story, the continuation and conclusion of a dream of a stairwell many of us descend:
The Stairwell of Mequitzli II
The severity and frequency of the dreams have since subsided. In their place are hallucinations of mirrored prisons, the travels of a coin, the paradoxes of grammar, and all manner of things that seem arcane, unsolicited by even my own imagination.
I am still upon this endless downward descent, but its purpose - nested in its very nebulous purposelessness - gives me strange comfort. I hear murmurs emanating from these stone walls with their crude bas reliefs, a singing report of what happens outside in a place I have long ago since been barred rejoining. To believe these melodies, I am told that the outside has less and less need of books. I am told that the people participate in a kind of illusory cloud, connected to everyone and to no one. I can feel a waft of lonely cold whenever I touch the wall, and I now know that it is this enclosure, this infinite stairwell, which protects me.
This is not a prison after all. The walls that encircle me actually should be understood in their inversion; the walls encircle the world, and I am walking in the only free space left.
The walls continue to morph and tell me stories of the outside, filtered and translated into a lasting mythology. True, the symbols and icons have become cruder, but they are a direct reflection of what occurs in the prisonhouse of the world outside, which is actually an inside, a tragic shell. These symbols, roughly hewn, their sneers twisting, the agony and lament of a world that can no longer express its feelings because it has lost all intimate contact with a language it once knew. And me? I am disconnected from this lost tribe as well, and can hardly remember a time when I participated falsely among them. Since I started this descent, it did not take me long to realize that I'd wind on down further - forever, perhaps. Another tribe will rise from that world with its principles fresh, its language an exploratory limb curiously encountering what is around it. New words and symbols will form. The same problems that have afflicted the tribes of before will come to afflict them, too, in time...And, in time, they will realize the boundaries of their space and not be able to escape them. By then, the symbols will become cruder once more, the opulence and daring innovation of their myth-making will atrophy until their entire history becomes a flattened mush of uncertainty and despair. They will have created new gods that will eventually leave them, or will become ghostly and mute. Wars will mark one part of their decline; hostility toward creation and difference will finalize their denouement. I will be a witness from outside, this outside that appears like an inside, a winding core that has no other name but time itself.
There is a solemn kind of joy that marks a journey of this kind. I am consigned to this state of reading the history and myths of a people through the impressions upon the walls that emerge and stretch their shapes. It is the impression of their phenomena that I scan in this perpetual twilight descent. Will the imprisoned tribe ever learn something? I cannot say. Their cruelties will continue to amass, and eventually go unrecorded. I cannot bear the responsibility of being the universal memory of so many tribes coming and going, of times, of grand epochs and declining eras of madness and violence. So, I refuse to remember beyond what I choose to. I continue to scan these walls as if they, and not me, were moving before my eyes.
I gaze deep into that pit, that chasm, and yet feel no fear. It is all that is unknown and free. Yet I do not elect to toss myself into it. There is something holding me to my slow descent upon these stone stairs. I cannot let go of the desire to know and to see and to understand whatever will come next, even if what comes next is just a variation of what happened long before. Perhaps this is my hope - that something new, truly new, will come to pass. I may be disappointed, but both hope and future are inexhaustible.
If the architecture of this mysterious place is an indication, then the future may not be as inexhaustible as I had imagined. I do not know if it is my imagination from far too long traveling in this place, but it seems that the stairs are narrowing. This is the only pattern I know, so I cannot say with certainty if it will continue. But perhaps one day the stairs will be so narrow, the walls so close, that I will have no choice but to make that misstep that sends me hurtling down into that abyss. Perhaps, again, the pattern will change and the steps will widen once more. Peering over the edge does not furnish me with an answer since the steps may have been narrowing gradually for so long and far, and one can only see so far in this place.
Time here seems to be measured by space. Distance is what records time, but not indelibly. I begin to wonder if when I pause to rest, or in those long str
etches of dreamless sleep, if time stops. If this were the case, I also wonder if time is contingent upon my progressive descent, and what would happen if I chose to turn around and ascend - would time inside that vast prison go in reverse? Although I toy with these thoughts, I will not put them into action since I understand so little that I would not impose my arrogant experiment upon something that is perhaps its own perfect design. I must view the steps I have passed to be no longer existent.
I have yet to encounter any other travelers upon these stairs. Either they are immortal - as I may be - and so would not expire for me to find their bodies, or I am alone. Or, perhaps, I have yet to cross the distance required to encounter their corpses. If someone has passed before me, was that person the author of these carvings that have become cruder with each passing step, or am I right in my speculation that these carvings are the symbolic impression of the immense prison on the other side? I have become weary of my own company, the torment of circuitous thinking that companions my endless descent. However, I have become accustomed and resigned to my own company for so long that I cannot imagine what horror another being would be.
I have come to the following conclusions:
If there is a meaning to the carvings upon the wall, they cannot be known simply by examining them
The context of these carvings is forever denied me.
The meaning of the wall carvings is precisely its own.
The carvings are endless, even if their variations are finite.
The author of these carvings must either be plural, generational, or otherwise by an immortal hand.
None of these conclusions satisfies the philosophical mind, but these are the only conclusions I can conjure. An endless narrative with no meaning or purpose any can divine, rumbling downwards for an inestimable distance, expressions that are both alien and familiar simultaneously or otherwise gain in meaning only by the imposition of the viewer. To contemplate something infinite, with its finite variations, usually results in the weak habit of assuming some kind of order to make sense of utter meaninglessness (beyond it being simply an expression). Every carving contributes to the endless whole, but no individual artisan has any knowledge of this. It is a synergy of an infinite metanarrative, and all play their parts in it unwittingly.
Is it god? I think not. I now dismiss the very idea that this is perfection, perfection being an attribute assigned by the limited minds of humans. This simply is, free of any discernible purpose or right and wrong. The stairwell, the chasm, the carvings upon the walls - all of it merely”substances” itself. Without will or agency, it merely functions, a Spinozistic kind of deity that is in and of everything. I have attempted every form of analysis gifted unto me by human knowledge, and yet I have not come up with anything more definitive by way of adequate explanation. I have sampled the mystic state, trying to comprehend this temporal non-space, throwing myself into hallucinatory trances that only seem to reflect back to me the variegations of myself. The carvings haunt my dreams, and I have attempted to perform an analysis on them, partitioning what I think to be dominant themes and motifs that may yield some sort of clue - all for naught.
My memories continue to flee from me, being replaced only with my time here. I can dimly remember what it was like before I embarked on this descent, a place that I now know with more visible assurance was in actuality a prison. I can faintly recall the long hours spent in argument and dialogue with contemporaries on abstract matters of the universe we had no hope of solving, and my conclusions to them would inspire them to declare me a nihilist. But it is not that I do not believe that there is no meaning, but that it is unknowable, and no method will decipher the metanarrative be it through logic, historical documentation, art, or mysticism. Something unknowable does not mean that it does not exist, but that our capacities are limited.
I am beginning to lose my language. It becomes harder to think in words. The new language that has rooted itself in my thought, supplanting the very human tongue I once knew intimately, is made up almost entirely of images - the carvings on the wall that are so many voices of a kind, their petroglyphs occupying a roughly similar orbit in my mind as it does the winding descent of this eternal shaft. I am occasionally paralyzed by a sudden internal luminary flash, a grand cataract of white light that hobbles me and threatens to send me over into the chasm if I am not quick and careful enough to plant myself upon the steps. Also, there are moments of quite uncomfortable chill, a draft issuing from the wall that numbs me.
Postface:
With one last gesture before abandoning all the rudiments of spoken or written language, before a complete consummation by thinking in pure symbols, it should be said that the petroglyphs' meaning has finally disclosed itself fully. Whether my sanity has been confiscated in my immeasurable duration here, I cannot say and leave it to those inside the walls to discern. I see in cycles three, a “memnoir” of sorts. I see an infinite library from which is plucked a singular narrative bolt that cuts across the day leading into the crepuscular end. I see what is born of paper and ink, the black and white genesis of a world that disperses its contents freely and vastly without bounds into the vacuum. From this unthinkable library comes unnatural books, books that only the Library destines to be in the hands of some at particular times, despite the caretaker librarian's efforts to suppress the will of the Library itself. From paper and ink comes the synthesis of a man who will stand as the full incarnation of atrocity, horror, and liberation.
The second act is composed of fire and voice, painted in red and gold. The foretold man, the product of a very meticulous synthesis of an artist, a scientist, a madman, a prophet, a figure of pure anonymity, and a philosopher comes to ruthlessly dominate desire by its unfettered emancipation.
The last act, where the knife of history herself glints with its one steel finger, is smoke and ash. The grey and silver of this act brings the narrative to its circular closure, and I see the reprise of a new feudalism take root after a cataclysm not easy to put into description. A new series of gods supplant the old in that cyclical fashion where things always repeat, but repeat differently. I grant as many clues as what will come to pass, as it must and so will it be, as a language of symbols permits. Gimaldi and Castellemare, Albrecht and Sigurdsson, Calembour and Schulmann. These names do not register any alarm for those who come across them as of yet, and perhaps never. But those who encounter these names in whispers without mouths ought to take note of them.
To say that any of this has come to a conclusive end is folly. The acts I have spoken of signal the beginning, and even if this appears at the end of some tome, it is but the first signatory of a dramatic pact between fiction and its opposite where their differences are harmonized to the point of abolishing their distinction.
And so ends the report of my quest, but the beginning of an impossible thought, a seventh meditation. I tarry no further but to delve into that impossible thought as the stairwell narrows to such a point that it becomes infinitesimal in ratio to the wall, and all becomes an absorbent chasm where not even light escapes its totality and inconceivable mass. I trouble myself with a meditation that will chart different course for you and me. It is a meditation bequeathed to both of us, on a stairwell or in an illusory prison. Ponder still this one thought, this one maddening meditation that will incite such a chorus of perplexity and perhaps extreme vexation: libraries infinite, stairwells without end, and mountains without their valleys.
How can we even think of Gimaldi without his Castellemare? I cannot read the signs well, but maybe you can.
44
Epilogue
Gimaldi, you have been primed for this, with due preparation with this book that you have read. Take what you have learned and disseminate to all those who would listen.
From the Dedication Page of the Ars atrocitatis (1st edition) by Alberto Gimaldi
I am making an unconventional dedication by way of an open letter to a figure I may never encounter again. The Library is a vast thing, and I h
ave no assurance that he will ever come across these words. But, I feel the only way that he has any possibility of hearing me is if I put these words down in a book.
Dear Castellemare,
Now that you have decidedly vanished, taking your powder at the most inopportune time as if to continue along with the torments of unresolved mysteries you have seeded within me, I know that the only hope I have in reaching you is by the commerce of what we both highly regard: books. And I also know that it is in that marketplace where such commerce happens, the vast and paradoxical Library itself, where my writing will hopefully find its way to you. To write a book may be, in the end, the only way to contact a librarian who has absented himself.
I now regard the path you led me along with all its dead-ends, forks, frustrating enigmas, and drying up leads to have been absolutely essential to the narrative you helped co-develop. In fact, I know that the narrative set aside for you and me was coeval with the Library itself, and I have learned that mysteries are not merely fossilized in the dense sediment of books, but rather that books are their own genesis of mystery. You have also taught me, in the rather circumspect and devious ways in which you operate, the vital lesson of the Backstory: namely, that it was up to me to write the narrative you and the Library wanted to see actualized. I had been a puppet manipulated by a series of events and episodes to be compelled to write the book the Library desperately needed to have in its collection. I still do not fully understand the connection between the Library and the world's fluctuating and variable narratives, but there are fully determined factors that are put into motion to keep history moving.
The Infinite Library Page 57
